Poets to Check Out - William Letford

William (Billy) Letford recites his poem 'Be Prepared'.
Knowing his day job is a roofer adds an extra dimension.
Loving the Stirling accent too!

2012 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

I entered this last year with what I thought/think is a really strong poem and got nowhere. Just saying.

Entries are now open for the 2012 Hippocrates Prize for poetry and medicine, which is for unpublished poems in English.  Judges for the 2012 Hippocrates Awards are New York poet and critic Marilyn Hacker, medical scientist Professor Rod Flower FRS and BBC broadcaster and journalist Martha Kearney. Awards will be presented in London on Saturday May 12th 2012, at the 3rd International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine, to be held at the Wellcome Collection rooms in London. During the 2012 Symposium, there will be readings by Jo Shapcott, Past-President of the Poetry Society, and US poet and 2012 Hippocrates awards judge, Marilyn Hacker. 

The Hippocrates Awards
With a 1st prize for the winning poem in each category of £5,000, the Hippocrates prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 2 years, the Hippocrates Prize attracted around 3000 entries from 31 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia. Awards are in an Open category, which anyone in the world may enter, and an NHS category, which is open to UK National Health Service employees, health students and those working in professional organisations involved in education and training of NHS students and staff. Co-organizers are poet and translator Michael Hulse and post-doctoral humanities researcher Sorcha Gunne. 

Details here

Silence - Abridged call for submissions

Abridged is a lovely publication. 0-24 was beautifully put together with poems and art. 

To those who have ever known sound, true silence can be but a myth. It is a phantasm, and something to be feared, for in silence we are vulnerable to our own conscience and its persistent echoes of memory, desire and confusion; we lose the means of dismissal and voluntary ignorance and become vulnerable. In silence we are naked, stripped of the sound layers we have used to define ourselves to outside eyes, a defensive muffling of truths. Today we abjure silence, avoiding its solitude. We are in a constant conversation with an ultra-social and info-overdosed humanity repeatedly relaying sculptures of mundane phrases that numb us to the experience of meaning. We dare not lie still enough to stir or coax the phantom film reels of our past from their shadows. Instead we light fires, shouting and stamping our feet to drive back the dark and its inhabitants. It is our fear of the silence of the void, the vacuum. Humanity cannot see nothingness but we run from it, choking the subtle sound of our own breathing with the bustling of contemporary life where everything is virtual and reality utterly abandoned. We convince ourselves we grow by sponging up the noises of the clattering world that engulfs us. In silence we are trapped as we are made to face the cold starkness of what we feel is missing, or the fierce jab of what we long to erase. We stand in silence and we stand in a room of mirrors. A ticking clock is a heartbeat.

Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Silence issue. 

A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. 

Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. 

Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. 

Closing date for submission is Jan 14th.

…lay me down the long white line, leave the silence far behind…

www.abridgedonline.com

Review of Heaney’s The Human Chain

Review of Heaney’s The Human Chain

By Nicole O'Driscoll

Seamus Heaney explains that his second book, Door into the Dark, was a ‘gesture’ towards our understanding of poetry as a ‘doorway’ between words and submerged feelings. Published in 1969, the title of that volume had a very different resonance with a poet who was forty-one years younger at that time. Human Chain as a title offers reassurance to a much older man who has survived a stroke that he can still explore those doorways, but with connections that draw him back. The line of the human chain and its characters hold onto him, the explorer of ‘the dark,’ ensuring his exit again back into the light of everyday being.

The poems are grouped around a set of themes or links that maintain the sense of the chain running through the collection, unbroken. There is plenty of meditation on the way about how the links do get broken: through loss, tragedy, obscured memory, taciturn communication and the end of old traditions. In ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ Heaney could not feel his wife Marie hold his affected hand in the ambulance on the way to the hospital after his stroke, nor could he see her properly because a drip-line dropped down between them, ‘bisecting’ their view of each other. 

Contemplation and apprehension of death form the backdrop of Human Chain, but one of the ways that Heaney assiduously repairs the links is through his characteristic use of Virgil, focusing this time on the theme of eternally returning home. In ‘The Riverbank Field’ he quotes The Aeneid, in which the ‘spirit troops’ are given second bodies and encouraged to drink from the River Lethe so that they forget that they had ever been to the underworld. Virgil’s conclusion on the subject, which Heaney likes to end the poem on, is that the 

‘soul is longing to dwell in flesh and blood

Under the dome of the sky.’

The poem invokes the possibility of resurrection to life in a way that spares us even the trauma of remembering past lives and deaths.

Heaney sheds the usual light on everyday experience through the ordinary rituals of family and community, and his colloquial use of language to accentuate the atmosphere of being amongst the ‘spirit-troops,’ the unsung heroes of The Human Chain. But much in the style of Seeing Things he also takes those rituals and transcends them beyond the ordinary. In ‘A Mite-box,’ the alms collector pierces a piece of card with a pin for every household that donates ‘A way … to see a way to heaven.’ The whispering tongues will know which household hasn’t made a donation towards their heaven-bound travel expenses – that is the way of the close-knit community. But to Heaney, put alms and charitable missions to one side, and that transcendent view is already our birth-right as long as we are ready to capture the moment. The pinhole of the alms card provides ‘The same as when a pinholed Camera/ Obscura unblinds the sun eclipsed.’ ‘An Old Refrain’ paradoxically sings a new tune about having an unboundaried view from our earthbound place, which we create as our own locale in the way that we name things. 

The theme of ‘father and son’ has long infused the question of death with the pathos of mourning by association rather than by direct reference. Heaney understates his own imminent ageing; rather than patronise his reader, he leaves it to us to make the connection that he is now the most vulnerable link in the chain. In ‘The Butts’ he describes how as a young lad he would reach into his father’s suit-pockets, scavenging for cigarette butts to smoke. The suits had a degree of self-possession – ‘a bit standoffish’ – that was lost to his father in his old age. Young Heaney finds ‘Nothing but chaff cocoons,/ A paperiness not known again until the last days came,’ when his father, frail and underweight, had to be washed and cared for ‘Closer than anybody liked/ But having, for all that,/ To keep working.’

This gentle, unceasing rhythm of caring for a frail elderly person contrasts with the title poem that is all heaving and straining under the weight of the grain-sacks. On the farm they need a chain of at least two people to carry out their labour, though in the first stanza Heaney imagines that this chain is a line of aid-workers feeding a starving crowd, with ‘soldiers firing over the mob.’ Hand-to-mouth existence is no match for these ‘spirit-troops’, who seem to have lost the hang of connectivity.  

The musicality of cooperation and linking that undulates throughout this volume is interrupted in the title poem by a vision of threatened annihilation. And this is the truth that we must all face sometime in our lives: ‘The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing’ of lifting grain-sacks together in the rhythm of shared life can be back-breaking. The moments of relief, ‘quick unburdening’ of each load’ feel so great that each cannot match the last. Taking a breather from the labour of living feels momentarily freeing, and singular: ‘A letting go which will not come again.’ But if these moments are to end altogether, ‘once. And for all’ the individual’s vision of the human chain slackens. We must then feel prepared to contemplate the finality of our doors into the dark while we adjust to knowing that our senses devour our last summer, like Derek Hill in ‘The Baler’ who

Could bear no longer to watch

The sun going down

And asking please to be put

With his back to the window.’

Creative Writing in Bray Co Wicklow

The lovely Dave Lordan, poet extraordinaire, can also teach.

What: creative writing classes
Where: Bray Institute of Technology
When: Monday January 23rd for beginners
OR
Wednesday 25th January for intermediate.
Intermediate level is suitable for people working or wanting to work on a book project.
Beginners is for those who want to write for a stimulating hobby, who have never written before, who have been away from education for a while etc.

What time: The classes run from 7.30 to 9.30 pm for ten weeks

How much: 120 euro with concession for unwaged, payable to Co Wicklow VEC.

You can register by ringing 012866111 or emailing nightschool@bife.ie. 

Another Writing Workshop at Galway Film Centre

Scene Writing Workshop
What makes a compelling scene?  Is there a way to approach writing, and the all-important rewriting? With the Galway Film Centre/RTÉ Short Script Award deadline fast approaching (approx late Feb/early March 2012) where 2 awards of €9,500 are given to 2 filmmakers to make their films, this practical workshop with script editor, Mark McIlrath, will help you to improve and refine your scene writing skills. These can be applied to shorts or features. Working over 2 days, you will write different sorts of scenes looking at: the dramatic structure; the scene objectives; the beats; the function of the scene; if there is a theme underlying the action (what you’re giving the actors to ‘play’); are you using props and physicalising the conflict through action; whether there is actually anything ‘in play’, or the scene simply seems to lead to a predictable outcome with no sense of anything really being at stake.

Participant Profile: Writers should come with a definite story idea in mind – or better still, a 3 – 8 page Treatment.  You can then pick out scenes from your film story to write during the workshop.

Date: 2 days, Friday 17th & Saturday 18th February, 2012 (9.30am - 5.30pm)

Cost: €120. Please note this workshop is strictly limited to 8 places.

Web: http://www.galwayfilmcentre.ie/training/scene-writing-workshop/

Some Courses at the Irish Writers Centre

Poetry Writing with Catherine Phil MacCarthy

3rd February to 23rd March: Fridays 11am - 1pm

€220 / €200(members)

This eight-week workshop is introduces some  'ways in' to writing that stir both memory and the imagination. It offers a warm and constructive environment to read and gain feedback on recent work and the focus of the workshop is on participants' own poems and on developing a collection for publication. Participants are invited to send poems in advance of the workshop that they are keen to progress.

 

Writing the Short Story with Sean O'Reilly

17th January to 20th March, Tuesdays 6.30pm-8.30pm, €280/€260 members

A ten-week course for short story writers seeking to develop their craft in the dynamic context of a group. This is a chance to immerse yourself in the issues around the contemporary short story, to focus on producing drafts of new stories and to have your work discussed in detail by other writers.

Novel Writing with Chris Binchy

17th January to 20th March: Tuesdays 6.30-8.30pm. €280/260 members
This eight-week course is aimed at people who are in the earlystages of writing or planning a novel. The course will provide feedback on participants' submitted work and will focus on identifying their strengths, while discussing narrative structure, character development, pacing and plot.

 

Finish Your Novel with Conor Kostick 

16th January - 26th March: Monday 6.30-8.30pm. €280/260 members

This is a practical course for writers who are already part-way through the writing of a book. The goal of the course is that by the end of it, those attending will have gained sufficient impetus, clarity and enthusiasm for writing that they will go on to complete their books. 

Intermediate Creative Writing with Nessa O'Mahoney

18th January to 7th March: Weds 6.30pm-8.30pm €220/200 members

You've taken your first steps into creative writing; this eight-week course will provide you with the skills and confidence to develop your own voice and experiment with a variety of forms and genres. During the ten weeks, we'll examine poetry, poetic form and imagery, novels and short fiction, screenplays, radio plays, and scriptwriting. The emphasis will be on generating new work, and finding ways to improve existing work.

Beginners' Creative Writing with Alan Jude Moore

19th January to 22nd March: Thursdays 6.30pm to 8.30pm. €280 / €260 members

This ten-week course is aimed at people getting started as writers.  Through exercises, discussion and advice you will develop your skills as a writer and produce new work. The aim of the workshop will be for participants to go away with an improved sense of their own abilities and how best to use these to further develop their writing.

Feature Writing with Henry McDonald

19th January to 22nd March: Tuesdays 6.30-8.30pm. €280/260 members

On this ten-week course Henry McDonald, author and Ireland Correspondent of The Guardian, will cover feature writing techniques for magazines, internet and newspapers, and how these genres differ from the who, what, where, when and how of conventional straight news reporting. Hands-on research and practical writing exercises will form the basis of this dynamic course.

Crime Writing with Cormac Millar (Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin)  

24th January to 13th March: Tuesdays 6.30-8.30pm. €220/200 members
This course is suitable for anyone interested in writing crime fiction. Over eight weeks, it explores topics such as finding story ideas, developing plot and structure, genre, characterization, dialogue, description and scene writing, social and political themes, finding the narrative voice, editing and continuity, writing a pitch and a blurb, approaching agents and publishers. 

 

Poetry Workshop with Enda Wyley

4th February: 10.30am - 4.30pm. Saturday. €80/70 members  

Have you been writing poetry for a while and would like feedback on your work or are you just beginning to write and hope to be inspired and encouraged? This one-day poetry workshop run by Enda Wyley aims to inspire and encourage participants to study poetry by established poets, create new work and to share their existing work with class members.

Writing Your First Novel with June Considine

4th & 5th February: 10.30am - 4.30pm. Sat & Sun. €150/135 members

Whether you are writing your first novel or still contemplating how to begin the opening chapter, Writing your First Novel offers you an opportunity to explore the many elements involved in bringing your work through the construction stage to completion. Step-by-step, from the opening page to the all-important ending, this practical weekend workshop, facilitated by well-known novelist June Considine, will cover character development, plot, dialogue, setting the scene, time scale, building the structure of your novel and discovering the narrative voice.